Jonathan Kay: Seven final thoughts on the U.S. presidential election

Seven final thoughts on the U.S. presidential election

I have no “predictions” to offer for Tuesday’s vote. Just because I have a job in the media doesn’t mean I have insights that extend beyond the obsessive statistical analyses contained on 538 and similar sites. In fact, I am probably less reliable than other would-be predictors, because my job requires that I expose myself to persuasive ideologues who are “100% certain” that their guy will win.

Notwithstanding what I just wrote, a very, very smart friend of mine who tends to follow these things quite closely tells me that the best guide to any U.S. election is to take the 538 estimates and then add 10% to the GOP side. As of this writing, that formula would give Barack Obama a 76.3% chance of winning on Tuesday. Just sayin’.

I agree with the analysis contained in this article: The U.S. economy is set to get better no matter who prevails on Tuesday. In this sense, it’s the reverse of 2008, when the victor was guaranteed to step into a disaster scenario.

If Romney loses, the GOP’s true believers, once they’re done with election conspiracy theories, will (inaccurately) conclude that their side lost because it did not have the courage of its most radical activists’ convictions. Such a conclusion would be wrong: Romney surged in the polls only after he moved to the center in the first debate — a factor that was far more significant that night, I believe, than Obama’s lackluster performance. Nevertheless, the urge to construct an ideologically purified right-wing alternative to the GOP could bring on a third party run in 2016, thereby ensuring that the Democrats win that election, too.

America’s two biggest meta-problems — campaign finance and entitlements — will persist no matter who wins this election. Tackling the former will require an overturning of the 2010 Citizens United case, something that is obviously beyond the power of any president. Entitlement reform, meanwhile, seems impossible in a Congressional environment dominated by party-liners with little interest in co-operating with the other side — a phenomenon captured beautifully by these graphs in Sunday’s New York Times.

From a parochial Canadian perspective, the man to root for is Mitt Romney, since he says he would green-light the Keystone XL pipeline. But David Frum has a point when he argues that Tuesday’s most important vote, Canuck-wise, won’t even be an election. It will be a ballot proposition, and a state-level one at that. If Michigan refuses to take Canadian money to build a bridge that everyone (except the existing monopolist, who has used his millions to promote the referendum campaign) says we need, there will be no clearer evidence of Lawrence Lessig’s argument that money is destroying American democracy.
On this crucial issue, Canada — and Jean Chrétien in particular — never looked so good.